The field of nucleic acid nanotechnology has rapidly grown from simple junction formation of just a few synthesized strands to complex interacting systems with hundreds of de novo designed and synthesized, self-assembling strands.
Most of the early development of structural nucleic acid nanotechnology is based on so-called DNA tiles, which are individual, rigid DNA complexes composed of multiple, single stranded DNA with crossovers. The complexity of the traditional tiling approach was improved by the introduction of a DNA origami approach, in which short synthetic DNA strands are globally coordinated by a single information-barring scaffold to form nucleic acid structures en masse.
More recent work with single stranded oligonucleotide offers more complex nucleic acid structures through the synthesis of extended sizes and the use of combinatorial expression patterns.